1. Technical Field
Embodiments of this disclosure relate to an image forming apparatus including a cooling conveyor to cool a sheet-type recording material, such as a sheet of paper, having an image fixed thereon by heat while sandwiching and conveying the recording material with a conveyance belt(s).
2. Description of the Related Art
Image forming apparatuses are used as, for example, copiers, printers, facsimile machines, and multi-functional devices having at least one of the foregoing capabilities. As one type of image forming apparatus, electrophotographic image forming apparatuses are known. Such electrophotographic image forming apparatuses typically have a fixing device to heat a toner image borne on a recording material (e.g., a sheet of paper) to fix the toner image on the recording material. Such recording materials having toner images fixed thereon may be stacked on an output tray of the image forming apparatus.
In such a case, the recording materials having toner images are stacked one on another in heated state. As a result, toner is softened by heat retained in the stacked recording materials, and pressure due to the weight of the stacked recording materials may cause the recording materials to adhere to each other with softened toner. If the recording materials adhering to each other are forcefully separated, the fixed toner images might be damaged. Such an adhering state of the stacked recording materials is referred to as blocking. To suppress blocking, a cooling device may be employed to cool a recording material after a toner image is fixed on the recording material by heat.
For example, as a device for cooling a recording material while conveying the recording material, an image forming apparatus has a cooling conveyor including a cooling member to absorb heat of the recording material having an image fixed by heat via a conveyance belt while sandwiching and conveying the recording material with a belt conveyance assembly including the conveyance belt. For example, JP-2012-098677-A describes an image forming apparatus including the following cooling conveyor. The cooling conveyor described in JP-2012-098677-A includes a belt conveyance assembly having conveyance belts to sandwich and convey a recording material and cooling members disposed at inner circumferential sides of the respective conveyance belts to absorb heat of the recording material via the conveyance belts. In addition, the cooling conveyor also has liquid-cooling-type components, such as a radiator serving as a cooling unit to maintain the cooling members at low temperatures. With the cooling conveyor having such a configuration, a recording material is cooled from both of the front and back faces to effectively suppress occurrence of the above-described blocking.
With increased demand for power saving, recently, there has increased the number of image forming apparatus performing the following control. For example, an image forming apparatus controls devices other than, e.g., a controller, to reduce or stop the supply of power in a standby state (hereinafter, during standby), that is, a state in which the image forming apparatus is waiting for a subsequent image formation signal after a certain threshold time has passed from the precedent image forming operation or a state immediately after the image forming apparatus is powered on. For example, JP-2007-133174-A proposes an image forming apparatus that stops, during standby, operation of a cooling fan serving as a cooling unit to adjust the temperature of a fixing device and operation of a heater serving as a heat source of the fixing device. Such control is performed to reduce power supplied to the cooling fan and the heater to cope with demand for power saving. Such control may be performed in an image forming apparatus having a cooling conveyor to cool a recording material having an image fixed by heat while conveying the recording material. Such an image forming apparatus may control the cooling unit and a conveyance belt to be stopped during standby.